The speaker returns to a garden where he used to play freely. Now a forbidding chapel stands at its heart, its doors shut and the commandment “Thou shalt not” branded over the entrance. Love itself seems dead: the garden is choked with graves and tombstones instead of flowers, while priests in black gowns patrol and wrap his joys and desires in painful briars. Before this, he lay beside a sleeping Love near dank reeds, only to hear weeping, and the thistles and thorns told him how they were deceived and driven into barrenness. The speaker experiences a crushing loss—the natural, joyful garden of childhood has been replaced by a landscape of guilt, control, and mortality. The mood is one of quiet grief and suffocation, as if the very possibility of innocent love has been walled off.
The Garden of Love — Summary
I laid me down upon a bank, Where Love lay sleeping; I heard among the rushes dank Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild, To the thistles and thorns of the waste; And they told me how they were beguiled, Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen; A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door; So I turned to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be; And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.